A free 3d model of a bench, suitable for renderings of patios, porches, courtyards, etc. As usual the model is available in 3ds max format and in 3ds.

Download 3D Bench Model

In this short tutorial I will show you a way of creating a carpet in 3ds max using vray fur. Before I begin, I need to say that you need to use vray fur ONLY when you absolutely need it (when the camera is really close to that specific object that the vray fur is applied to, or if you need to render at a very high resolution); if not using vray displacement is the way to go. If you decide that you need that you need a very high level of detail in your rendering, than be prepared for higher rendering times.

First, create a plane at the desired dimensions. This will be your carpet.
With the plane selected, go to “Create > Vray > Vray Fur”
By default, the vray fur will be linked to your plane. Assign them a desired material (keeping both the plane and the vray fur gizmo selected) and leave all the rest of the parameters unchanged for the moment.
If you hit a test rendering at this point you should end up with something like the following:

Under the parameters rollout of the vray gizmo, start adjusting the parameters. The “length” is (obviously) for specifying the lengths of the threads in your carpet. In this case I have set it to 4.5 cm, the thickness to about 0.1 cm and left the others as default.
Looking at the test rendering above, it is obvious that you need more threads. You can do this by scrolling down to “Distribution” and increase the parameter right next to “Per Area”.
NOTE: By default this is set to per area, which means that the distribution of the threads will affect the entire area of the object selected, while the “per face” will distribute threads on each face of the object.

After setting the per area distribution to 1.2 I ended up with the following result:

It’s starting to look ok, but at this point it is too uniform and definitely needs some variation.
This can be easily arranged by tweaking the parameters under the variation rollout of the vray fur. All the parameters have very intuitive names so you can understand easily what they do (direction var, length var, thickness var, gravity var)

After having set the direction var to 0.8, length to 0.5, thickness var to 0.7, and gravity var to 0.7, I ended up with the following rendering.

CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO VIEW A HIGHER RESOLUTION RENDERING
Following the same method you can create grass, animal fur or other similar stuff, but again keep in mind that this will take a lot of rendering time.

Here is a short tutorial on how to add a glow effect to self illuminated objects in photoshop.

Open the rendering that you want to edit in photoshop and make a copy of the layer.

On the upper layer, select the bright areas that you want to apply the glow on, using the magnetic lasso or the polygonal lasso tool. (Alternatively you could render an alpha channel for that specific part of the object so that you don’t need to select anything afterwards).

After having selected all the needed parts, chose a large brush with white color and paint the selected area like in the image below:

Now invert the selection by pressing ctr+shit+I (all at once) and paint the new selection black..

Change the layer blending from “normal” to screen and apply a diffuse glow filter to it (Filters>Distort>diffuse glow). In this case I set the graininess to 0, glow amount to 17 and clear amount to 20, but feel free to play with the parameter’s settings until you like what you see

Note: Before applying the diffuse glow filter, make sure you have set black as foreground color and white as background color, otherwise the effect will be inverted.

We are starting to obtain the effect we are looking for, but still at the moment it looks a little bulky… we need it to be more subtle. What we need to do is to apply a Gaussian blur filter (in this case with a radius of about 5).

The only thing left to do is to adjust the opacity of the layer you’ve been working on, until you are satisfied with the result. Additionally you can play with the color balance in order to obtain yellowish (or other colors) glow effects.

The same technique can be applied for adding specular bloom to windows in interior renderings.

A 3D Model of a lamp, suitable for interior residential renderings. The model is available in 3ds max version 9 format, with the materials settings for vray, and in 3ds format for people that don’t use 3d max.

Download 3d lamp model